Experiments

A while back I wrote a thought experiment entitled "Open Source as God: A Religious Thought Exercise". I ran across another thought experiment called God's Debris by kooky cartoonist Scott Adams of "Dilbert" fame which says some similar things to what I said in my entry.

"Think about this," he continued. "As we speak, engineers are building the Internet to link every part of the world in much the same way as a fetus develops a central nervous systems. Virtually no one questions the desirability of the Internet. It seems that humans are born with the instinct to create it and embrace it. The instinct of beavers is to build dams; the instinct of humans is to build communication systems."

Over at DailyKos, they're starting a new project called the dKosopedia. The project is loosely defined as an "open-source political encyclopedia." As with any other open-source project, members of the community contribute directly to the project. The theory is that the combined skills of thousands or millions of people working in a decentralized fashion can create something far more advanced far more quickly than a single group of people dedicated to the project.

These projects would not be possible without the internet. Instant communication and the ability to transmit huge amounts of data over great distances at great speed allow the huge open-source software projects like Linux OS to be very successful. The dKosopedia is a similar idea to Wikipedia, another open encyclopedia project. These projects represent a step forward for open-source, where the collective knowledge and ability of users is harnessed not to create a specialized software product, but useful information available to everyone.